Did you know? - Arnold Machin - the
sculptor of the "Queen's Head" was born in Stoke-on-Trent

Arnold Machin R.A. O.B.E. 1911-1999

Arnold Machin is renowned
for the creation of the British postage stamp portrait of Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II.

It has been reproduced more
times than any other image in history, with more than 200 billion copies
having been printed.

Arnold Machin was born into a family of 12 at Oak Hill, Stoke-on-Trent
on the 30th September 1911, the year that the Titanic was launched (captained by
Edward Smith, also a son of Stoke-on-Trent). Soon after his birth the
family moved to nearby Trent Vale.

His father was a freelance modeller and
made Arnold his first set of modelling tools. His elder brother, Will,
worked with his father after leaving school, and they both worked in a
shed at the bottom of their backyard. They both tried to survive by
producing small models for the pottery industry, but they couldn't make
it cost effective and eventually had to find more reliable jobs. Will
worked as a modeller at a local factory, and their father worked as a
turner at Buller's Porcelain Factory.

Arnold started work at the age of 14 as an apprentice china painter at
the Minton China Factory, where he stayed for seven years. During the Depression he learnt to sculpt at the Art
School in Stoke-on-Trent.

Herbert Minton Building
(former Art School)

He later moved to the Derby School of Art, and in 1937 to the Royal
Academy in London. After spending the Second World War as a conscientious
objector, he returned to modelling and sculpture.

Machin was retained by Wedgwood as a designer in 1940, but work for
Voluntary Service for Peace in London during the Second World War led to Machin’s imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs for twelve months as a
conscientious objector. In 1943 he returned to his beloved modelling and
sculpture, initially at Wedgwood, with many of his creations becoming
prized collectors items, such as his sculptures “St. John the Baptist”,
“The Annunciation” and “Spring”

Taurus, the Zodiac
Bull
Considered to be Arnold Machin’s most
successful Wedgwood design, incorporated simplified moulding
techniques for production by unskilled potters during the years of World
War II.

A pair of chess pieces sculpted by Arnold Machin
and manufactured by
Wedgwood in black basalt.

The Annunciation (Two Figures)
c 1944 by Arnold Machin part of the Tate collection

School of Art, Queen
Street, Burslem

Around 1945, Arnold had thoughts of becoming an art
teacher and taught part-time at Burslem School of Art.

In 1946 he was elected an associate member of the Royal Academy. Then
in 1959, following in the footsteps of John Flaxman RA, who had produced
models for Wedgwood in his youth, Machin became Master of Sculpture at the
Royal Academy School, a position he held until 1967 - the longest-serving
member of the Academy.

He was elected an Academician in 1956 and a Fellow of the Royal Society
of British Sculptors.

In 1949 Arnold married Pat Newton and they bought a house at The Villas
in Stoke. Arnold used a long, narrow greenhouse for his studio, and Pat
had a room at the top of the house as hers. They made Stoke their base,
and Arnold would drive down weekly to London where he kept his small
studio on. Their son, Francis, was born in November 1949.

House - no. 15 The
Villas, Stoke-on-Trent
the home of Arnold & Pat Machin

Arnold Machin was a quiet man with strong beliefs. He made
national news in 1956 when he chained himself to a gas lamp at the Villas, Stoke-on-Trent,
which was destined to be replaced by a concrete electric post, declaring
that this stand was part of a growing campaign against the spread of "Subtopia"
(modernism) being led against Sir Hugh Casson.

Mr Machin accepts a
lamp-post(Curlicues and all)
HIS WIFE CHAINS HIM TO IT TO DEFY SUBTOPIA

THERE'S a
gas lamp at the bottom of sculptor Arnold Machin's garden. A very
fine example of early Victorian ironwork, complete -with curlicues
and a one and a half hundredweight chunk of stone firmly attached to
its base.

Mr. Machin "won" it at Stoke-on-Trent yesterday after his wife
had chained him to it. It was all part of his protest against the
encroachment of subtopia into the Victorian backwater in which he
lives. The lamp-post used to stand In the middle of the estate of 24
Victorian houses called "The Villas."

Yesterday Mr. Machin, who lives in one of the villas, heard that
a gang of workmen were coming to pull it down and replace It with an
electric standard-concrete, pre-stressed, streamlined.

I forbid you

So for six hours Mr. Machin - 46 years old, a little thin
on top - sat with his back against the lamp. Beside him sat his
artist wife, 34-year-old Patricia. They held an umbrella over their
heads to shield them from the sun. They read a book: "The Seven
Lamps of Architecture," by Ruskin.

Mr. Machin proclaimed to the workmen: " I forbid you, as a token
protest on my part, to remove this ornamental gas-lamp centrepiece."

Politely, the workmen withdrew. They held a conference. They sent
for the city surveyor, Mr. D. F. Brewster. Mr. Machin turned
to a chapter called " The Lamp of Beauty."

A police car arrived with a chief-inspector and a sergeant. Mr.
Machin reacted to that by, embracing the standard with his arms.
Patricia slipped a padlock and chain over his wrists.

Enter the crane

Mr. Machln proclaimed to the police: "This is my protest against
the destruction of all the beautiful things which is going on in
this country."

There was another conference, and Mr. Machin announced: "I am to
be allowed to have the gas lamp put up in my garden."

Patricia unlocked him. A mobile crane hauled the lamp out of the
ground, trundled it 40 yards to Mr. Machin's house; and dropped it
neatly outside his front gate.

"I shall put a plaque on it recording the events of today." said Mr. Machin. -" It will be a memorial to the stupidity of the modern Subtopian age."

"We will grow roses up it, too," said Patricia. But that
1

½cwt.
chunk of stone on the bottom is going to cause them some trouble.
The sculptor whose art work stands in the Tate has got to start
digging.

Said Patricia: "It's going to need a pretty big hole, but we'll
get it up somewhere."

Daily Mail, 12 July 1956

photo in 2000 of the lamppost (by now moved
back to its original position) which caused Arnold Machin's protest in
1956

Coins and Stamps

As an accomplished and acclaimed sculpture Machin was
asked in 1964 to design a new effigy of the Queen for the decimal coinage,
which was to be introduced from 1968; this effigy was used for all British
coins until 1984 (it was still on coins of New Zealand and Australia in
1985 and it remained on Canada's coinage until 1989.)

In 1965 Machin was asked with four other artists to submit
'renderings' of The Queen’s head for a new stamp design. Machin beat the
competition and produced the final portrait of The Queen.

When essays were shown to The Queen the head was couped, or cut off at
the neck. She said that she would prefer a corsage and Machin obliged,
creating the final, classic bust. The Queen chose a dark olive-sepia shade
for the inland letter rate, deliberately to emulate the colour of the
Penny Black. The first stamps with the new head were issued in June 1967.

Machin had been successfully working on the head for the new, as yet
un-issued, decimal coinage. Photographs taken by Lord Snowdon were the
source for the new coins, and were now used for the new stamp profile.

Although stamps are
a form of graphic design that we interact with daily, it is rare
that we ever get to see the faces of those that have created them.
This makes a commemorative miniature sheet of stamps issued in 2007
particularly significant, for it bears the face of Arnold Machin,
the artist behind the iconic image of the Queen that has graced the
UK’s stamps since 1967. The stamps were released last week on June
5, 40 years after the first stamps went on sale.

“Arnold Machin created probably the world’s most reproduced work of
art with his classic sculpture of the Queen,” says Julietta Edgar,
head of special stamps at Royal Mail. “Like many examples of great
design, simplicity was the key to its success. We wanted to
celebrate this important milestone in the life of a true British
icon.”

Arnold Machin plaster cast used for image of Queen on stamps is found

Of the original
casts, three are held by the Royal Mail. A fourth was recently discovered
in the studio at the family home at Garmelow Manor, near Stafford, StaffsPhoto: BNPS.co.uk
www.telegraph.co.uk

"An original cast of the most-reproduced work of art in
history, a portrait bust of the Queen, which has appeared on more than 320
billion Royal Mail stamps printed since 1968, has been discovered in a
cupboard in an artist’s studio. The iconic image was created by the former
Wedgwood designer Arnold Machin in 1966 and chosen personally by the Queen
from works by five artists. The 18in (46cm) by 16in (41cm) cast found in
Machin’s studio at the family home in Garmelow Manor, near Stafford, is
one of only four surviving originals."

Times on-line September 4, 2008

Garmelow Manor at Eccleshall, near Stafford was sculptor
Arnold Machin’s home for many years until his death in 1999

This former post office in Newcastle-under-Lyme opened
as a pub in 2002 and bears the name of Arnold Machine - the
Stoke-on-Trent-born sculptor who designed the portrait of the queen which
has appeared on postage stamps since 1967, and the image of the queen’s
head for the first decimal coins.